The Stand Episode Two | Tracingtrails

Change is hard. Especially when it comes to art that is important to us personally. I certainly understand how people can be driven to a certain amount of emotional territoriality when it comes to childhood memories.

Just as an example, I remember a thirteen-year-old kid opening up a Christmas present from his step-grandmother. It had grabbed his attention because it was way heavier than the usual standard grandparent gift fare - namely the dreaded sweater or slacks. This had substance to it. So imagine that kids surprise upon opening it to find a massive hardcover book - the recently reissued new and expanded edition of Stephen King’s classic novel, The Stand. A surprisingly adult purchase to get from a grandparent and he could only assume that she had grabbed it off the sales display at the store, not really knowing the contents.

It wasn’t long before Stu, Larry, Fran, Nick, Glenn, Tom and all the others became close friends with our young reader. It opened his eyes to the nature of Stephen King’s Multiverse as Randall Flagg, a character from one of his other favorite books made a surprising return. It was a novel that promised a lot and it delivered.

I still have that book, although the dust jacket has long since been lost. Other than my copy of The Hobbit, it’s the longest standing member of my personal library and it is a story I have ingested in multiple formats, obviously the novel, but also on the kindle, in audiobook and in one network miniseries. Other than IT and the Dark Tower, there’s no material from Stephen King that I have read more often. It’s a story I have carried with me through five presidential administrations and three different decades of my life.

What’s my point with all that? Let’s just put a pin in it for a minute.

It’s still too early to say where I will come down on this new limited series. We’re only two episodes in and there’s a lot left yet to go. Several major characters still need introduction and there’s a lot more of this world that I need to see.

Episode two was largely centered around Larry Underwood, one of the more complex and conflicted characters from the book, in my opinion. In the book, Larry has just hit it big with a hugely successful song and has started to enjoy the luxuries of sudden wealth. At the same time he is starting to come to terms with the fact that he doesn’t entirely love the person he seems to be becoming. Through the moral lens of his mother, we see a life that might be teetering on the precipice of a crucial moment for him.

In The Stand we see characters in the apocalypse drawn in one of two directions, either essentially good or evil. Or rather, people who are drawn to a leader who is either essentially good or evil. Society is built again from the ground up and for the most part people fall on one side or the others. What I find so compelling about Larry Underwood is that you could envision him ending up on either side. Save for a few interventions and revelations for him, he easily could have ended up in Las Vegas under the watchful gaze of Randall Flagg.

The question is, does that complexity come through in the show? Not really. But I also think there isn’t as much space to allow for that. Instead the writers created a new character, a former roommate who accuses Larry of stealing his hit song from him. Is this in fact true? Who’s to say? It isn’t really important though as I think the point is to cast a somewhat darker light on Larry’s moral center. To cast some doubt with the viewer who sees Larry doing heroic things but also might think that he can’t be trusted either. Larry seems to be in his own essential moments of transition and it remains in his hands to see where he ends up.

Several more characters are introduced in this episode. Characters that will have a larger role to play but for now we see them taking their first steps down a significantly different path. Lloyd and Nadine are brought into the fold quickly and given some broad strokes. We’d like to see more of them obviously, but these are just the opening moves. They have a dark road to travel down in the course of this story but even the most brilliant of endeavors requires a fairly mundane starting point.

And finally, the moment I’ve been waiting for. My biggest gripe with the miniseries has been the portrayal of Randall Flagg. I’ve never liked it. And I think Jamey Sheridan was a great actor. The issues, in my opinion, were in the creative choices made about the character. For me, it was just played wrong and what should have been sinister instead comes off a little too much Howdey Doody and not so much of that edge I expect from the character.

We have already gotten one new iteration of Randall Flagg from the recent adaptation of the Dark Tower. I wasn’t expecting much from Matthew McConaughey but he actually got pretty close to the mark for me. I know King fans have rejected the movie for the most part but I found his performance to be a welcome surprise.

So how does Alexander Skarsgård hold up?

As an aside I did want to point out that the Skarsgård family seems to be establishing a stranglehold on King villains as Alexander’s brother Bill has already done his turn as Pennywise in the recent adaptation of IT. Power to them, I suppose but it does seem appropriate considering the backdrop of King’s Multiverse.

I can’t give a real report card or reaction based on the span of a few minutes but in the scene between Flagg and Lloyd I definitely found promise and reason for optimism.

We are still ultimately in the building block phase of this series but thus far I think those blocks have been handled well and appropriately.

I did want to make sure I extended my compliments to the production team. I don’t know who is responsible for the medical prosthetics in this but they are doing a top notch job. The sight of the infected is truly disturbing, really sending home the terror of this destructive virus. Not that that particular point is hard to drive home here in 2020.

So at the conclusion of two episodes I am still retaining my same level of optimism. There’s still a lot to go but I feel excited to see where they take things from here. I would assume that we will be introduced to Nick next week and with him, Tom Cullen and at that point, the primary actors in this tale will have been established. Moving forward from there, I think it will be clearer how much and what should be expected from this journey we are on.

What I need to keep reminding myself is that we are all unique in our fandom and that what trips my trigger is going to be completely different from someone else. What has preceded this represents how I come down on this series but I’m just one voice. The one unifying point between us Constant Readers is the constant reading. The rest is just background noise. And to be clear, I still absolutely reject people who can’t seem to express their disagreement with something without being nasty about it. We all need to respect our fellow fans, even if you think the person just “doesn’t get it.”

Ultimately, on the question of adaptations of King’s books, what better source to turn to than the man, himself? The following quote was taken from his introduction to the expanded version of The Stand:

“...in the end, I think it’s perhaps best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd, and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction ...That is not necessarily bad … but it is limiting.

“The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.”

M-O-O-N. That spells, right on.

I also wanted to mention a few words about CBS because, as streaming services go, it’s one of my least favorite. And I don’t mean the quality of the programming.

The amount of paid advertising that you have to sit through is pretty ridiculous. The commercials make me feel like I’m watching Hulu in 2010. Except I’m paying for it.

And before anyone comes swooping in with the thing I just don’t understand - I really do get it. In order to create this programming, the network needs revenue. This is how they generate said revenue. I get it. And obviously I’m willing to deal because I’m watching. But I think the model can be improved. I’m not a fan of the practice of hiding a bigger paywall behind another paywall.

But that isn’t even my real gripe. My real issue is how the ads are placed in such a ham-fisted manner that it’s like the episode was edited by Leatherface with a chainsaw. You can’t just drop in, not even in the middle of a scene, in the middle of a sentence and go to an ad for Progressive car insurance. So many moments are ruined by the sudden intrusion of an ad.

And it isn’t like some underpaid tech is formatting old episodes of Cop Rock for streaming. This is CBS’s show. This is their streaming platform. They know when the C-breaks are, it shouldn’t be a surprise.

I don’t expect perfection.

But they could be doing quite a bit better than they are doing now.

Do better with the old snip-snip and quit killing the moment. Your actors and composers and writers and so forth are all working their tails off to put out this product. Don’t come crashing through like Mister Kool-Aid and ruin everything.

Anyway, it had to be said. See you next week, fellow Constants.

My well-loved edition